Faculty Distinctives
» Faculty members in the political science department are actively involved in research and scholarship in addition to advising and teaching. Over the past five years, they have published 13 books and 44 articles in scholarly journals.
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Corwin Smidt, Jim Penning, Doug Koopman and two non-Calvin professors recently published their major study Pews, Prayers, Participation: Religion and Civic Engagement (Georgetown Press, 2008)
» Faculty regularly work with student research assistants on conference papers and articles that are then jointly published or presented with the assistants.
Recent graduate Kyla Vander Hart '08 traveled with Professor Amy Patterson to Zambia in 2007 to assist with research on the church's role in shaping AIDS policy in Africa.
» During 2008, faculty presented papers at professional conferences in Lusaka, Zambia; Lodz, Poland; Prague, Czech Republic; St. Andrews, Scotland; Nairobi, Kenya; and Ljubljana, Slovenia; in addition to a number of locations in North America.
» In five years, political science department faculty have directed seven off-campus programs for students from a variety of majors at Calvin.
- Professor Corwin Smidt wrote a blog while he was director of Calvin's off-campus program in Hungary in the fall of 2008.
» Political science department faculty are fully invested in a number of interdisciplinary programs, including the international development studies major, the urban studies minor, the gender studies minor, the African and African diaspora studies minor, and the Asian studies minor.
» Thanks in large part to the department’s Washington, D.C., and state and local internship programs, the faculty serve students as readily available counselors and contacts for job or other professional opportunities after graduation.
